What Prison Expansion is Costing Crime Survivors

Article by Arwen Bird 

Our current system’s focus on prison expansion diverts time and money from prevention and helping survivors of crime and violence heal from the effects of violence. Instead we’re paying for new ways of incarcerating people. Across the nation we see this dynamic play out as communities scramble to save funding for treatment programs, victims’ services and shelter programs—while decision makers seem ever-capable of finding and spending money to build new prisons. Failing to utilize more effective and creative solutions has huge ramifications for survivors of crime and violence.

If we want to build sustainable and effective responses to violence, we must develop cohesive plans that go far beyond imprisonment. The first step in this process is identifying what’s most important to have happen in the aftermath of crime or violence. What do we want? Healing for all impacted by violence and crime, accountability for those responsible for any act of violence or harm, and future safety for everyone.

Healing: Everyone affected through an act of violence or crime needs to heal from the experience in order to continue their lives in peace.

Accountability: The system must be guided by and grounded in taking responsibility for personal actions and choices that caused harm by making amends. The same is true about the decisions made by institutions, which at times can be harmful to not just individuals but large groups of people.

Future Safety: The system must work to prevent crime and violence without sacrificing our democratic ideals… so that individuals and our communities have a good quality of life.

For the purposes of this article we focus on meeting the needs of survivors and communities; however, because crime survivors and prisoners come from the same communities, we all suffer under our current system’s focus on punishment. Survivors and our communities lose out when our system continually prioritizes using resources for prison expansion over programs and services that could be used toward healing, accountability and safety.

How would the system be shaped if it did work to meet these goals, and what sort of programs or policies would it use? Let’s look at a few real world examples of programs that can make a difference to survivors of crime and violence.

Restitution Programs: Restitution is one of the few, if not the only opportunity for some form of amends to be made between people who have caused harm and their survivors.  Individual state and local governments that prioritize restitution have demonstrated successes. How? By devoting staff time to tracking survivors and the people who’ve been ordered to pay. In recent years programs in Colorado have won praise for their comprehensive approach to getting restitution to survivors. Real reform will come when community leaders and decision makers work toward a system that:

• Consistently includes restitution as part of human-centered accountability.
• Funds community based advocates for both survivors and people who owe restitution.
• Adequately funds programs that help people who owe restitution to be able to earn money to pay it, such as job training and employment programs.

Crime Victims’ Multi-service Centers: Survivors need community-based services, aimed at helping survivors heal, that they can access at any point in their recovery from victimization.  For over twenty years, Safe Horizon in New York City has served survivors of crime and abuse across the city.  This program works with survivors of all forms of victimization and abuse, including torture, child sex abuse, human trafficking, stalking and domestic violence.  After the bombing of the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001, they established comprehensive programs to assist individuals and families who lost loved ones, those who were injured, residents who were displaced from their homes, and those who were economically impacted as well as the many New Yorkers who witnessed the attacks. Through programs such as these – based in the community rather than prosecutors’ offices and not competing with resources for criminal prosecution – survivors can be served in a manner that truly meets their needs.

Community Based Drug/Alcohol Treatment: For many of the same reasons that people who have been victimized are best served by programs based in their community, so are people struggling with addiction served best in the community. This is especially true when you consider that the majority of people in our prisons and jails have a substance abuse problem, and many are also parents. Community based treatment programs are proven to be less expensive and also save money through reducing the collateral costs of incarceration, such as the costs of foster care for the children of incarcerated parents. Treatment services that are based in the community help to hold people accountable by addressing their needs and helping them make good choices, rather than the perpetuation of a revolving jail door for people living with addiction.

New Approaches to Victim Awareness: Across the country new models that work to build empathy for survivors of crime and violence are gaining momentum. In Oregon, one such model is happening at Oregon State Penitentiary. Instead of a traditional Victims Awareness Panel where survivors share their stories for an audience with little interaction and dialogue, survivors from the outside as well as prisoners who volunteer to participate share their stories of surviving violence.  This model recognizes that many of the people inside prison are also survivors of violence and creates a space for them to share their experiences.  This process helps everyone involved build trust and the ability to truly listen to the experiences of survivors. Instead of a stand-alone event, the program unfolds over a series of meetings and allows for people to come together and connect on a more transformative level.  This model provides an avenue for healing for survivors and prisoners, while making the space for prisoners to change their behavior through a deeper understanding of the experiences of people surviving violence.

We need a system that is capable of meeting the needs of the individuals who perpetuate and/or are harmed by violence. Rather than being treated as numbers (prisoners are known to the system by their ID numbers rather than their names) or witnesses (many victims assistance programs categorize survivors as witnesses to the crime), we need a system that regards each person as a human being first, and from there guides them into a specialty program depending on their needs (such as stable housing, employment, etc.).  

New prisons will not get us there. They will only take us farther away by diverting resources away from the options we’ve described here. Stopping prison expansion in all its forms and funding community-based services is one of the best things we can do for people currently surviving acts of violence and is essential for preventing future violence.

Arwen Bird is an Open Society Institute Fellow working with Crime Survivors for Community Safety, a program of the Western Prison Project. This article originally appeared in the Summer 2005 issue of Justice Matters.